Coca-Cola Amatil Supply Chain is developing knowledge sharing using Communities of Practice (COP). It’s six months since our first COP was formally launched, in Maintenance and Engineering, and shortly after this for our Systems Super Users and Key Users. As we are starting to develop our 2016 business plans and budgets this is a good time to consider progress, benefits and next steps.

We set up a single Maintenance and Engineering COP and invited all maintenance and engineering team members in Australia and New Zealand to participate – around 200 people. In the Systems area we launched three COPs – one for each operational system in scope, approximately 50 people in total. In both instances we launched these communities using a five week guided social learning program (Work, Connect and Learn – WCL) to develop skills and behaviours to participate in the COP. We ran WCL initially for the entire Maintenance and Engineering community, and then separately for the Systems communities. I shall post separately on evaluation of the WCL program.

The three crucial COP characteristics (as defined by Wenger-Trayner ) of domain, community and practice were used to identify factors impacting COP maturity – as shown in the table below.

Examples of value creation were identified in the Maintenance & Engineering and SAP Manufacturing COPs in particular, including:

Streamlining of processes

Sharing resources for troubleshooting

Cross-site input on problem resolution

Sharing improvements / lessons learned

Case studies and examples of successful COPs within organisations in similar industries and environments (manufacturing, engineering and technically oriented settings) were identified and reviewed (view curated articles). Lessons drawn from these case studies and our experience include:

Carefully define the domain and purpose of COP – keep it narrow enough to be attainable

Form strategically designed COPs aligned to business goals, set tangible outcomes, and find ways to integrate activities with work (e.g. link to projects, build activities into work flow), support and guide them closely

Provide guidelines and a lighter touch for other COPs that form

Provide guidance and support to help people access and interact in COPs

Make sure that interesting content is available

Enable Subject Matter Experts to become COP champions

Generate active senior management support

Most importantly, it is clear that value created by COPs can take considerable time to materialise. The key insight is that to generate tangible performance improvements you need to put effort and resource into community management. Accordingly, a key review recommendation is the appointment of a dedicated Community Manager.

Next steps identified are:

Create community strategies and road maps to build existing COPs.

Advocate for creation of the Community Manager role

When the Community Manager role is established (assuming it is), identify and design focused cross-functional COPs aligned with business processes with high impact on priority goals in our business strategy

As discussed in the case study post on context, this initiative is expected to contribute to reducing equipment down-time and decreasing risk associated with concentration of deep process knowledge in a small number of long-tenured Engineers. A number of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) were identified up-front to evaluate the value created by this community. This was informed in part by the conceptual framework of value creation from online interactions from Etienne Wenger, Beverly Traynor and Maarten De Laat. See Jane Bozarth’s article for an introduction to the value creation cycles in the framework.

KPIs and Measures

Measurement Points & Methods

Three main measurement points have been identified:

Prior to community launch – to establish a baseline

Immediately following the Work Connect & Learn program (guided social learning program to support the development of skills and behaviours to participate in the community)

Six months after completion of the Work Connect & Learn (WCL) program

Monitoring of some of the measures will occur on a monthly basis during this six month period to help inform community management.

Data and feedback will be gathered using the following methods:

Surveys of all maintenance and engineering team members at the three main measurement points

Monitoring of activity on online community spaces in SharePoint

Interviews / discussions with Maintenance & Engineering Managers and Capability Managers (who are providing on the ground supporting to community members to participate)

Focus groups with community members immediately following and six months after the WCL program

Capture of value creation stories on an ongoing basis in the six months after the WCL program

Additional Thoughts on Value Creation Cycles

The careful reader may have noticed that indicators of Reframing Value have not been explicitly included in the KPIs. While we have not explicitly set objectives for value at this level, it will be surprising if this does not follow success in the other value creation cycles. Reframing Value will be identified through value creation stories.

The value creation framework has recently been expanded to include strategic value and enabling value. We’ve not yet considered whether / how to include these in our evaluation strategy.

I came across the idea of using value creation stories to assess the value of online interactions in an article by Jane Bozarth. She used a conceptual framework from Etienne Wenger, Beverly Traynor and Maarten De Laat to write the story of how her online interactions create value. Their framework thinks about value in terms of five different cycles, which Jane summarises clearly in a diagram in her article.

Value creation cycles

As Jane urges, I have read the full text of this framework, and have used their guiding questions to write a value creation story about my participation in the 702010 Forum. This is my practice run in preparation for gathering value creation stories to evaluate communities that I am helping develop in my organisation. I’ve written this post by responding directly to the guiding questions relating to each cycle of value creation. However, I would document value creation stories within my organisation by writing or recording (audio or video) a more natural narrative.

The 702010 Forum is a community of practice for learning and performance professionals applying the 702010 framework. Membership is subscription based, with some resources and webinars publicly available. A toolkit contains resources to support application of 702010, and members can participate in a range of events and an online discussion forum.

I have participated in a variety of asynchronous and synchronous activities including:

– attending webinars or viewing recordings, especially case studies by members
– delivering two case studies on webinars
– attending face-to-face events
– initiating and replying to discussions in the forum – and extending this in one case to email and phone discussions on a solution shared in the forum (more below)
– participating in a pilot of the Forum’s 702010 Practitioner Certification
– sharing and applying resources from the Toolkit with others in my organisation to assess status and develop improvements

Toolkit snapshot – showing entries I’ve ticked off as read

2. What specific insights did you gain? What access to useful information or material? (Cycle 2 – Potential Value)

Within a few months of joining the Forum I realised that while my organisation had adopted the 702010 framework a number of years ago, we had narrowly interpreted it. We were deploying blended learning where we used activities based on learning from experience (70) and others (20) within formal structured programs. However, we were not purposefully enabling people to learn as they worked or building ongoing social learning capability. From a webinar on the changing role of the learning function I saw that the skills of our capability team needed to be broadened. I gained an understanding and language to talk to key stakeholders about the opportunity to impact organisational performance more effectively if we added performance consulting, performance support, and social learning to our toolkit.

3. How did this influence your practice? What did it enable that would not have happened otherwise? (Cycle 3 – Applied Value)

These activities and insights enabled me to have different discussions about 702010, our learning strategy, and internal Capability skills, particularly with senior managers and our Capability team. The most significant shift it enabled was an update to our Capability strategy in April 2014 to include ‘Continuous Workplace Learning’ as an element. This broadened the remit of our Capability team and created the space for us to get strategic with social learning.

We revamped our Governance Board by applying the “Toolkit for Establishing a Learning Governance Board.” Consequently we get better value out of our quarterly meetings by focussing on alignment with our business strategy.

Tonkin & Taylor Knowledge Shots webinar

A specific initiative accelerated by a case study in a Forum webinar was setting up a knowledge sharing site on SharePoint. When a senior manager gave me 1 day to prepare a prototype of a community hub on SharePoint I recalled a webinar where Tonkin & Taylor demonstrated their Knowledge Shots solution. I incorporated this into our prototype, and went on to build a variant of this for my organisation. You can see what this looks like in the guided tour of a community hub now set up on SharePoint. (Big thank you to Tammy Waite and Mark Thomas from Tonkin & Taylor, Forum members, for the support they provided by email and phone.)

4a. What difference did it make to your performance? How did this contribute to your personal/professional development? (Cycle 4 – Realized Value)

As per the examples given above, application of ideas, tools and solutions from the 702010 Forum has enabled me to perform and contribute to my organisation in ways I may not otherwise have been able to.

The 702010 Forum was one of the first Learning & Development communities that I’ve participated in. During 2014 I got active on Twitter and started this blog. This helped me to create a Personal Learning Network (PLN) which encompasses many other communities (e.g. Third Place, OzLearn, PKMChat). Collectively my participation in a number of communities and interaction with my PLN has transformed and accelerated my professional development.

My first webinar delivery

One way that the Forum has supported my development has been by increasing my confidence to work out loud publicly in order to learn and improve. In December 2013 I delivered a case study in a Forum webinar. I found the reflection and learning from delivering this webinar valuable, and saw that others could benefit from me working out loud. This was a catalyst – it gave me the motivation and confidence to continue working out loud by blogging and speaking at conferences.

4b. How did this contribute to the goal of the organisation? Qualitatively? Quantitatively? (Cycle 4 – Realized Value)

Realised value for my organisation is unfolding. It’s also difficult (and unnecessary) to unravel the influence of the 702010 Forum on my organisation’s performance versus that of other communities and networks I participate in. Our Capability strategy is better aligned to our overall business strategy as a result of applying ideas and tools from the 702010 Forum. We are using a broader range of Capability approaches and activities to achieve our goals. I think it will be another 6-9 months before we are clear on the outcome of these activities.

5. Has this changed your or some other stakeholder’s understanding of what matters? (Cycle 5 – Reframing Value)

An emphatic YES to this question. It’s shifted the perspective of two very important stakeholder groups, senior managers and the Capability community, about the importance of the 70 and 20 elements of the framework and the range of approaches we can use to build Capability. We’ve reframed our Capability strategy, launched communities of practice and embraced performance consulting.

Participate, Participate, Participate

I shall close by encouraging everyone reading this to reflect on the communities and networks they are part of and consider their current level of participation. The more you participate, interact with others, apply ideas from these groups and share back what happened, the more value you create for yourself, your organisation and other community members. So, what are you waiting for? Get in there and participate.

I’d love to hear about the value that others have found in participating in communities and networks – you can leave your thoughts below or pingback to your own blog posts.

In September 2014 we decided to get strategic with social learning in Coca-Cola Amatil’s Supply Chain and establish a Community of Practice for our Maintenance and Engineering team members across Australia and New Zealand. Helen Blunden of Activate Learning was engaged to help with this initiative. Helen and I are Working Out Loud about the development of this Community.

This post provides links to all our posts which collectively form a case study that we’ve developed as we worked. I’ve arranged them in a logical sequence for you to read if you wanted to follow the case study in rough order in which things happened (although there is a lot iteration). I’ll keep adding to it as we post more on this case.

1. Context – Michelle’s post about the background to the decision to get strategic with social learning and establish the Community of Practice

3. Work, Connect and Learn Program – Helen’s post about the guided social learning program we decided to develop to help community members learn skills and behaviours required to participate in online community activities

To support the launch of Coca-Cola Amatil’s Maintenance and Engineering Community of Practice we’ve built an online Community Hub in SharePoint 2013. I invite you to take a video tour of this Hub. As the tour is 15 minutes I have also provided a brief written description of the spaces set up on the Hub for Community members to connect, share and collaborate. (Note – I’ve recorded this video using Microsoft Lync.)

Key Hub Features

The Hub sits on our Maintenance Engineering SharePoint site, and is basically a dashboard with links to a range of spaces and resources on both SharePoint and the internet. In the video I walk through the spaces we’ve set up on SharePoint for Community members to interact online, connecting, sharing, solving problems and improving practices together. All of these spaces are accessible from any mobile device or computer using an organisational login. The mobile access is particularly important for maintenance tradespeople who spend most of their time in the production environment, away from desks.

The CCA Links on the hub are:

Discussion Forum – standard discussion board with ability to create new discussions, reply and like. The board can be sorted and filtered in a number of ways, and search is available on the site which will include discussions in results. A useful function I don’t discuss in the video is that an individual can quickly set up an alert to receive notifications of changes on the discussion forum via email (immediately, daily or weekly). This is helpful to stimulate those who aren’t working on SharePoint regularly to participate in forum activity.

Shared Notebook – a Microsoft OneNote notebook set up on the Maintenance and Engineering site. OneNote is a very easy to use, flexible collaborative tool. We have set up a section for use during the Work Connect and Learn program, and there is currently another section being used for Maintenance Managers meetings. We expect to see use of OneNote increase as Community members become familiar with it.

Contact Directory – a directory with expandable sections containing SharePoint profile key data. A person can be added to multiple sections reflecting the different groups to which they belong (e.g. Maintenance Managers, members of a physical site team, system Key Users). From each person’s directory entry you see whether they are online, start a Lync IM chat or call, create an email, access their contact details, or open their SharePoint personal page.

Example of Contact Directory popup with interfaces to Lync and SharePoint personal page

Supply Chain Knowledge Bites – a separate SharePoint site where anyone can share a short ‘bite’ of knowledge or ‘how to’ information. Documents and multi-media files can be included in a Bite, along with links to internet resources. People are often unsure about where or how to share their expertise, so we’ve set up this space to provide a common way of sharing and accessing documented know-how. The second half of the video explores Knowledge Bites in more detail.

Community members are learning how to use these spaces along with other collaborative tools (notably Microsoft Lync) through our Work Connect and Learn program. Program activities are being conducted in these normal working spaces so that people get used to using these spaces during the program, and continue to use them afterwards.

How the Hub was Built

Work on the hub commenced with a PowerPoint prototype which a colleague, Justine Jardine, developed with me in just one working day at the request of a keen senior manager who wanted to champion the solution at an annual planning meeting. We were able to respond so quickly in part because we had seen a demonstration of a knowledge sharing space set up on SharePoint 2013 by a New Zealand engineering firm, Tonkin & Taylor, in a 702010 Forum webinar. We included additional spaces and resources in the prototype, all of which we modelled on existing internal SharePoint sites. So, our prototype was low risk as we had working examples of all functionality included.

While our internal IT department provisions SharePoint sites using a standard organisational template, they do not build any functionality on sites. They also do not allow custom development, which ended up precluding some of the prototype features as Tonkin & Taylor had done custom development. Further, we were unable to use SharePoint ‘Community features’ as IT is still trialling these.

So, I developed the Hub using standard SharePoint 2013 functionality. While I knew how to build a dashboard, almost everything else I had to learn how to construct. I searched the internet for information and ‘how to’ articles and videos, with Helen Blunden (who was developing Work, Connect and Learn) researching SharePoint 2013 features alongside me. There is a LOT of freely available information about how to set things up in SharePoint 2013. I also got tips from our SharePoint SME in IT (he had time for quick questions), and appreciated some discussion with contacts at Tonkin & Taylor about their Knowledge Shots solution. Of course, the other way I learned was to experiment – to build things and see what they looked like, then adjust.

Several members of our internal Capability Community tested and reviewed the build as Hub components were developed. Often their excellent suggestions could not be implemented with standard SharePoint 2013 functionality, but did push me to figure out different ways to do things as we continued iterative development. The experience of building this Hub has made me more resourceful as a self-directed learner, and more likely to figure things out for myself than wonder why IT hadn’t “trained me” on using SharePoint.

Updates

At some point I’ll post an update about how Community members responded to the Hub and what adjustments or additional features we introduce. If you have any suggestions or feedback please leave a reply.

Twitter

In this time my Twitter network has grown substantially, with an increase in followers from 45 to 615, and I am now following 450 people. I have been looking for a Twitter analytics tools that will help me to look at who I FOLLOW, rather than my followers. I haven’t yet found a tool that does summary level data aggregation on this. Knowing about who follows me and what people find valuable in what I share is useful. However, I also need to know about those I have selected to learn from and seek to create possibilities with – the people I follow. So, by default I’ve looked at the analytics about my followers (approximately 2/3 of whom i follow) to consider this question, along with scrolling through my Following list.

My Twitter network has grown largely as a consequence of my Personal Knowledge Management and professional development activities, which use a number of online tools and communities plus face-to-face conferences and real-world work activities. As such, there are a lot of people in this part of my network from the Learning & Development profession, plus others who have an interest in social learning and communities. Geographically, my international network is predominantly in Australia, USA and UK as shown on the TweepsMap below. Given Australia’s business ties with Asia this is an area where I would like to grow my network. In Australia my network is concentrated in Sydney; I would like to grow my network in other areas, especially Melbourne and Brisbane.

LinkedIn

A year ago I said I would start sharing and learning through LinkedIn. I haven’t done this often, nor purposefully. I have found blogging, Twitter Chats, conference presenting, MeetUps, and using Feedly to aggregate blog posts and Google Alerts powerful ways to learn. I’m unsure whether actively using LinkedIn would create adequate incremental learning value. Having said that, I have recently noticed an increase in posts on topics relevant to me on LinkedIn so am not completely closed to the notion.

My number of LinkedIn connections has increased by approximately 25% to 630 in the past year. Mostly others have invited me to connect. I’ve accepted those connections where either I knew the person or felt based on their profile there was some common interest. Socilab generated the visual image of my LinkedIn network shown below (I selected ‘hide names’ so I could share the map, but did look at names on the image to understand the clusters and identify ‘bridges’ and outliers).

The map shows data for 499 of my 1st and 2nd degree connections. It includes links between those who are connected to each other. The clusters represent groups of people I know through roles in specific organisations (4 clusters), Learning & Development (L&D) professionals (1 cluster), and a non-work club (1 cluster). With the exception of the L&D cluster and the club, the bulk of my LinkedIn connections are people I have worked with in the past. As such they are concentrated in a small number of industries and professions, and mostly in Australia. My LinkedIn network is thus relatively ‘closed’ and lacking in diversity. The outliers represent potential diversity opportunities and warrant exploration, as do the bridges between clusters who are people who are potentially good connectors.

“Real World” Network

My ‘real world’ network are those people I spend time with face to face or currently work with in my job. Outside my organisational boundaries the people in my real world network tend to also be in my online network, but are located in, or have visited, Sydney or Melbourne. Within my organisation my network within my business unit is strong, and includes most of the managers and Subject Matter Experts around Australia, who are key stakeholders. It also includes a small group of people in our Indonesian operations, whom we supported to implement technical training in 2014. With the exception of people in Human Resources and Information Systems whom I have worked with on specific initiatives, my network outside of my business unit is small and weak.

Depth and Quality of Relationships

My network is deepest with those who I have had to collaborate most closely to deliver specific outcomes, and with those who share common interests that are related to my goals. This is a much smaller number than the total size of my network. I am comfortable to have differing degrees of intimacy and connection with those in my network. However, I have not been deliberate in identifying relationships with the most potential to create possibilities and opportunity for both myself and others. I’ve recently been participating in a Working Out Loud Circle. In the Circle Kits and his soon to be published book, John Stepper suggests the use of a relationship list – a short list of people who could support you to achieve a goal and to whom you could contribute. My experience using this approach is that it helps me to deepen key relationships within my network in a genuine and purposeful way.

My Network Development Goals

I shall PURPOSEFULLY and CONSCIOUSLY develop my network. My goal is to build a network which accelerates my learning, helps me achieve my goals, and creates opportunities in areas that I am most interested in for myself and those with whom I am connected. I intend to act with a spirit of contribution within my network.

In the coming year I will:

– Connect with more people in Asia, Melbourne & Brisbane

– Increase connections and sharing with those with an interest in Community building, especially Communities of Practice (COP), and those in industries where COPs are most commonly used (am thinking Professional Services and Consulting)

– Expand and deepen connections with people in Supply Chain roles and FMCG

– Prune some of my online connections to help me focus on those which create higher mutual value

– Maintain relationship lists to help me achieve goals by deepening relationships with relevant people

– Rebalance my Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and networking activities in my routine so that networking is purposeful and not just a consequence of my learning activities

– Do a review at least once a fortnight of my networking and PKM activities and conduct network maintenance activities. I shall find useful tools for this purpose – will try MentionMapp, socilab and Commun.it initially

Blog post coming soon on my PKM, Networking and maintenance routine.

Please reply to this post below to share any tips you have for people seeking to improve their professional network.

I originally posted this in early 2015. I also shared it as part of a multi-part case study on building a Community of Practice in maintenance and engineering at CCA. Four years on my practical application of social learning and all that I learned about effectively enabling it remains relevant, which is why I'm sharing it in my September 2018 newsletter.

For several years I set up and led an Academy in Supply Chain at Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA). One of the most important things I learned in my time with CCA was how to effectively use social learning to add strategic value to an organisation.

In October 2014 I spoke at the Learning At Work conference held in Sydney, Australia about my development as a social learning practitioner, and how this impacted the application of social learning in my business unit. If you want to harness the power of social learning more intentionally and effectively this case study about the evolution of how I got strategic with social learning will give you ideas and pointers.

I am now available to work with your organisation to develop and implement effective approaches to help your people to connect with others inside and outside your organisation who have common interests, challenges and opportunities. This enables them them to solve problems, improve processes and innovate together creating a high performance environment and impacting business results. Contact me at michelle@michelleockers.com or call me on +61 404 899 532.

A Moment of Insight

My reflection as I prepared to present at the conference and how this triggered an insight that shifted how I was using social learning.

When I was approached to speak at this conference an organiser asked me to describe what I was doing that may be of interest to the audience. She then wrote a session description and gave it a title. Unusually, this was not sent to me for review before the conference brochure was published. I was surprised by the session title that she chose - "Sneaking In The Social." Gosh, I thought I was experimenting and role modelling!

Reflecting on the title and preparing this presentation was a turning point - it was time to move from 'sneaking' to 'enabling'. It was two months before the conference, and I wanted something useful to share. I decided to get strategic with social learning. CCA adopted the 702010 framework at least four years ago, however we had applied social learning in a limited fashion in the context of this framework. In April 2014 we added 'continuous workplace learning' as an explicit element of our Supply Chain Capability strategy which expanded the endorsed role of our Capability team beyond structured learning programs to supporting informal learning. In September 2014 we defined a specific social learning initiative to contribute to a high priority initiative in our business unit strategy. This was the point at which we moved from experimenting with social learning to enabling it.